I cut out the age in my examples, I worry you are mixing the fact you are clearly both type in with that being true for all possible examples, you can be both at once but both can be separate and even a brief overview of a character can get really different when you get into the details.
My point was not that there cannot be differences, it was that fundamentally these things you present as two totally distinct options are really embellishments on the same fundamental concept. As I summarized earlier, the eccentric expert, embellished with additional physical detail (age, physical fitness, residence) and usually picking at least one of the aforementioned binaries: nature vs indistry, magic vs technology, meticulous vs reckless, and/or gregarious vs shy.
These are all, ultimately, the "eccentric genius/expert" personality, just embellished; embellishments are great and should always be pursued with most characters, but they don't change the underlying chassis. You aren't going to get, for example, a "Valley Girl" character from this, or a "Biker Gang Leader" character. You can certainly tweak knobs and dial up or down certain traits. But fundamentally, all of these characters will be (if you'll pardon a somewhat reductive term)
huge nerds and not much else. Jocks, preps, greasers, punks, etc. are not going to be represented here.
This is, in part, why I'm pushing so hard against the equivocation between personality and
profession. Profession is not totally useless when it comes to personality, it can give us hints and ideas. But I used my actor analogy above for a reason. Being an action movie actor tells you very little about a person, other than that they (probably, but not guaranteed!) aren't super shy, since they have to work with others and do public appearances. Being an entertainer doesn't really tell you anything about what a character values, what drives their behavior, what makes them "tick." That's what personality is, and profession is mostly orthogonal to personality. (I say "mostly" because some professions, such as "research scientist," are strongly associated with certain personality traits like "curiosity," so it's not like there's ZERO relation. But the relation is weak at best in most cases.)
also find it kind of funny that some people are complaining about gnomes having no resonant concept and others trying to say that all gnomes have the same personality. Both statements cannot be true, and are both being used to justify hatred of Gnomes.
I don't see these as even slightly incompatible, so I'm confused here. The reason gnomes only have one or two actually distinct personalities IS that they struggle to find broadly-appealing resonant concepts
so that they can have multiple distinct personalities under one umbrella. Tieflings' core schtick is being inherent outsiders and quite literally demonized because of their heritage, but that resonant concept manifests in multiple ways: the "stop being so stereotypical" version, the "we name our children after virtues to defy stereotype" version, the "learn about who my dark ancestor was" version, the "I have this dark power and don't know what to do with it" version, etc. Elves as we know them today were basically singlehandedly invented by Tolkien, but that means we have actual personality archetypes in Elrond, Galadriel, Feanor and his sons, Arwen, Luthien, Cirdan, etc., and we can combine that in various ways with the
sidhe of Gaelic myth to produce a wide variety of options while still retaining authenticity with these classic stories.
Gnomes have minimal to nonexistent representation in basically all widely-known myth and folklore. They have little to no representation outside of D&D and its creative descendants like World of Warcraft...where they are heavily typecast in a Flanderized version of their Dragonlance tinker gnome version. In theory there SHOULD be more to them (they can tap into the same fae concepts as elves, after all), but in practice there isn't, leaving them stuck without either of the usual avenues of escape: they don't have a Tolkien-equivalent to give us distinct individual personality archetypes to intermix and explore, and they don't have broad thematic concepts they can riff off of that aren't already covered by other, more popular options.
I think its because, for some reason, the gnomish traits arent passive facts, they are always cranked up to 11.
I think this directly relates to my previous sentence. Because they lack for both broad themes and individual character archetypes, there is pressure to make the character stand out in some other way. This pressure frequently leads to "quirky" behavior and excessive emphasis on the things intended to be unique to or special about gnomes. Unfortunately, that tends to mean being a comedy relief character and not taking things particularly seriously, even when they should be.
We can draw some fruitful comparisons with other uncommon options in D&D, like drow and githzerai. Drow as player characters were basically invented by Drizzt (which my phone wants to autocorrect to "Frizzy," and I find that hilarous.) The grizzled misunderstood loner hero, doing the right thing even though both his homeland and his adopted new home despise him. It's all very edgelordy and got REALLY old very quickly. WotC is working on addressing some of these issues by presenting other cultures of drow, but it's gonna be a process, not a single event.
Githzerai, meanwhile, were almost totally reinvented purely by the character Dak'kon in
Planescape: Torment, and yet post-PS:T githzerai never had anywhere near the negative response (nor the explosive popularity that prompted that response) that drow have. We can draw useful comparisons here: Dak'kon is a serious character, one who is
not edgy (despite his
karach blade), but instead wise, cautious, intelligent, and clearly having much more going on beneath the surface. Learning about him and his people is an interesting and difficult thing, and you can see his inner turmoil (rather a core part of the game's story, that all your friends are tormented and drawn to you as a result of your own torment), not as a kind of facile "wah wah I am an exile hated in the land where I save people, woe is me" way, but in a very serious and dignified way.
Gnomes, unfortunately, lean closer to the drow on this one. They unfortunately come across as weakly-written DL expies who aren't really serious as characters. If they aren't the expert on some topic (and thus usually an NPC), they're comedy relief. It would be great if more works used them to better effect. Such things are few and far between, and absolute hegemonic things like World of Warcraft significantly harm any possibility of moving out of DL's shadow.
